Matt Tuckey is a writer from Oldham, England. He covers celebrities, night life, Manchester, fitness, creative writing, social media, psychology and events. Some of this may, in some way, help others. Or maybe it'll just entertain you for a while.
Stay tuned for a psychology book review on the blog.
Saturday Afternoon: join Manchester Nightlife in Castlefield for some hopefully outdoor drinks in the sun. Dukes 92 from 3pm. The sun should just about be coming out, as are 6 people at the time of writing. It’s the perfect time of year for that area.
Sunday Afternoon: Manchester Nightlife are out again, this time to new club venue IDRA on store St. Veteran house music DJ John Digweed, from the Kiss 102 days if you’re in your 40s and 50s, shares the set with headliner Sasha. Second release tickets are £37. They will increase! I haven’t bought yet. At the time of writing I’m still waiting for attendees.
There isn’t a great deal else happening on Meetup this weekend, particularly not on the bank holiday Sunday. I’ve noticed this a lot on Meetup, that when it comes to those Mondays off, nobody seems to want to do anything on the Sunday night. Either I put something up (I ran a Northern Quarter bar crawl on a bank holiday Sunday a few months ago) or nobody does.
Dan Nestor’s Get High Now book features a section on natural remedies. One such example is the Mediterranean coriander plant, a staple in many Mexican and Indian recipes. A tasty herb, Coriandrum sativum can be bought fresh or dried, or even alive in the pot.
Nestor claims it can also get you high.
He describes it as an ‘Iranian folk remedy,’ and lists symptoms as including ‘wild hallucinations, laughter and eventually pitbull-like lurching.’
I got a whole pot from Tesco and transferred it to a baggie, then looked for an ideal evening to try it out. Thursday 9th April looked like the right time. I was planning to join the GetSocial group to do Point Blank, as I understand it a laser-based shooting range on Deansgate, but between the time the event was announced and the actual date, Point Blank themselves went insolvent. All 3 venues across the UK closed.
In light of this, GetSocial recalibrated and put on a regular bar drink meetup in Be At One next door. My car was in for a service, so it seemed like an ideal time to use public transport and see whether coriander has the effect that Nestor claims it does.
I got the bus in, arriving at 6 on an empty stomach.
Be at One graciously had a 2-4-1 cocktail deal, so I got 2 Cuban Zombies (full of rum and burning half passionfruit) and started sipping.
I went to the bathroom with a glass of water from the bar and shovelled down a whole pot’s worth of coriander leaf. Gross. I stayed and chatted to people, waiting for the effect to kick in, but the only difference I felt was from the sudden influx of alcohol. I dished out a few blog cards and tried to rope a few people into my own meetups, but generally it was a routine affair. I certainly didn’t get the high that Nestor had promised me. I had work the next day and obviously a bus to catch, but even so, I was way too drunk by 8pm and walked out.
So yeah, none of the aforementioned symptoms – maybe a chicken-like meandering back up to Piccadilly Gardens, but certainly no lurching.
Contents of tonight’s Journal Club: haikus, free writing and lemon pesto tots.
Organiser Fi runs through the ground rules:
CONFIDENTIALITY
SPEAK FROM I, NOT WE
STEP FORWARD, MOVE BACK
EVERYTHING IS AN INVITATION
BE KIND TO YOURSELF
It’s Wednesday 6th May, I’m in Hinterland Manchester at their monthly writing group. The theme tonight is ‘Living with Disturbance.’ First, though, a warm-up exercise.
RIGHT NOW, I AM FEELING…
...Good, ignoring the rubbish parts of life and remembering everything I have to look forward to. Granted, no day is perfect, and today is like any other. But essentially, I’m feeling gratitude for family, a steady job and freedom to come here.
-
Next, we talk about the meaning of disturbance, throwing out key words and phrases for the board.
CHANGE
CHAOS
INTERRUPTING
PEACE
JUGGLING
DISCOMFORT
Next, a prompt:
MY RESPONSE TO THE IDEA OF LIVING WITH DISTURBANCE IS
Everyone has to deal with a little disturbance in their lives, otherwise we’d have nothing to strive for. I was watching a video of Robert Greene about a prince in some faraway land, hundreds of years ago, who had everything handed to him on a plate. Guess what? He was massively miserable. The staff around him couldn’t figure out what was the cause of such upset.
It was because he had nothing to strive for. Nothing to motivate him. That’s why they’ Royalty like Prince William, have jobs flying helicopters etc. That’s why Harry (formerly Prince) was in the Army.
We need a bit of disturbance to get us through the day.
It’s when this disturbance becomes unmanageable that you need to ask for professional help. Don’t sweep stuff like that under the carpet.
-
Gong.
Next up: a haiku, a short-form Japanese poem, arranged in a 5-7-5 syllable format. The title: ‘Disturbance is the Dance of Life.’ Here’s mine:
What are you doing,
If not striving for release
From your own mind jail?
We had a chance to read out what we’d written, and people seemed to like this one.
The next haiku challenge involves a series of suggested words to be included:
WEATHER
EDGE
WEIGHT
HUM
SHIFT
BREATH
SPACE
EASE
-
I came up with 2:
We weather the storm
An admin task becomes
A demi-plie.
Without the crushing
Existentialist longings
I’m a potted plant.
Great session. I cannot find that ‘bored prince’ story anywhere, but I know it was Robert Greene who recounted it. Journal club is more than likely back the first Wednesday next month. Check Eventbrite for upcoming events.
Great meetup last night with Manchester Nightlife. Large group of 10, pretty sure all of them showed up too. Diecast offered up good cocktails, food, (I had the chicken shawarma, great but not cheap, but then where is?) ping pong, live music one end, a DJ in the other (house music in the end where there was no food or seats, so didn’t hear much of that) and all ended early enough to get the bus back too.
There’s a wedding coming up. Don’t worry, not mine.
I’ve got a new suit that fits me as I am, with a little give, in fact, but the wedding isn’t until late June. Hence, there is a 2-month period in which I could attack one of the ‘Before 44’ challenges I gave myself last August.
In particular, I’d like to get back into my older suit trousers, most of which are 30” waist. If I do this before the wedding, the suit I have will doubtlessly be too big, but with enough time I could easily fill it back out.
Furthermore, I’d really like to beat my bench press record, which has been stuck at 103kg since 2013. Other records are overhand chin-ups (23), underhand chin-ups (20) and dips (170). I’ve got a sprint machine record of 23.6kmph, and a local, hilly, 5.4km running route that I have done in 36:23. Let’s see if I can smash through all of these.
I currently weigh 86.7kg. I know I need to be 72.2kg to fit into my other suits.
There’s a way this can be done. I’m drinking tonight and eating food with the Meetup group. After that, no more alcohol. No junk food. Fight the cravings (hence psychology). Lots of gym classes and body weight exercises. Recipes. A welcome break from the constant plundering of my liver at the hands of overpriced cocktails and cut-price Aldi liqueurs.
It’s bank holiday Monday. I was in bed by 10 last night. What the hell, man. I forgot we all had an extended weekend and hence didn’t put up a meetup. Neither did any organiser of any other group, that I can see. So I stayed in with a plan to read a book, but then fell asleep anyway.
So much restaurant food this upcoming week. My poor wallet (and waistline).
I’m out with work tomorrow.
Wednesday night: Journal Club returns to Hinterland for writing exercises, prose, poetry and introspection. Also great vegan food. There’s a Meetup with Manc Mates. 7pm.
I have a pharma experiment review to go up Saturday.
Weekends after bank holidays tend to be quiet, but… that means shorter queues and waiting times for food, yes?!
I was talking to a few Manchester Nightlife group members recently and we’re set on Diecast for next weekend for food, drinks and music. 7pm. Good range of different food, great cocktails, with a live band in one room and a house music DJ in the other. Great stuff in the home of a disused metal factory.
I’m likely to start a new fitness project soon to counter the endless alcohol from the last month.
Saturday, 11th April ‘26: the British heavyweight boxer, 37-year-old Tyson Fury came out of retirement a *inhales* fifth time to fight *checks notes* Arslanbek Makhmudov, a 36-year-old Canadian-based Russian.
The British former champ Fury clinched the win with a unanimous decision, and then called out fellow Brit Anthony Joshua.
Joshua himself is now 36, so both fighters are on the cusp of the 38-Year-Old Rule. This, according to esteemed voice of authority on boxing Sharpbetting (?) is the age generally regarded to be the most appropriate age for retirement. Physical and mental health, brain injuries, neurological injuries and even death are all things that a fighter risks more as he progresses through his 30s. The general consensus is, don’t risk it.
What might author Robert Greene say about such things? He wrote The 48 Laws of Power, a book that’s been found hugely valuable to many, including rappers and sports stars, but is highly regarded in the business world too.
Law 47 is ‘Do not go past the mark you aimed for: in victory, learn when to stop.’
Tyson Fury has a net worth of an estimated £120 million. Anthony Joshua: £150 million. Granted, there are many people richer than them put together. There are 156 billionaires in the UK today, owning a million pounds a THOUSAND times over, each. But still, they’re presumably sat behind a desk, or on a yacht, for most of their day. They aren’t doing a sport when they’re trying to deflect repeated blows to the skull.
Both of these boxers have held titles. Both have had long-enough careers. Should they be fighting?
I doubt Robert Greene would think so.
“The moment of victory is often the moment of greatest peril,” Greene explains. “In the heat of victory, arrogance and overconfidence can push you past the goal you had aimed for, and by going too far, you make more enemies than you defeat. Do not allow success to go to your head. There is no substitute for strategy and careful planning. Set a goal, and when you reach it, stop.”
I expect Greene has no particular knowledge of boxing, beyond interviewing Freddie Roach, Manny Pacquiao’s coach, and being interviewed himself by MMA magazine Bloody Elbow. But he does understand conflict. The guy’s got a BA in Classical Studies. He’s well-versed in world history which, if you remember school, is punctuated with wars and with royalty meeting all sorts of awful demises. Among Greene’s bibliography is The 33 Strategies of War, so I expect he’s got a good theoretical grasp of fighting, if nothing more.
I’m sure Greene would agree with me that the time for Fury and Joshua to fight has now passed. There’s younger blood coming through. Both aforementioned boxers both had their fair share of victories, and have reached enough goals. The enemies they make from now on won’t be other boxers – it will be their own health.
